DARPA Looks to Bring ‘Common Sense’ to AI

The Pentagon’s top research agency is focusing its considerable AI efforts on the interim stage of machine intelligence between “narrow” and “general” AI.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which announced a multi-year $2 billion “AI Next” “campaign last month, is tightening its focus on teaching machine “common sense” reasoning. That capability remains beyond the reach of current AI constructs, and the research agency said it hopes to launch a “third wave” of AI technology that is adaptable while shedding light on the mystery of how machines learn.

Common sense reasoning is defined as “the basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge things that are shared by nearly all people and can be reasonably expected of nearly all people without need for debate.”
AI experts note the gap between AI inference and the ability to design systems that can draw directly on the rules of inference to achieve common sense reasoning. “Articulating and encoding this obscure-but-pervasive capability is no easy feat,” DARPA program managers note.

Related

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).